Wenatchee wildfire confounding firefighters
Jul 31, 2013, 1:47 PM | Updated: May 16, 2016, 1:49 pm
Firefighters are making contingency plans to protect a major wind farm from a fire growing outside Wenatchee. (Photo courtesy the Washington State Department of Natural Resources)
(Photo courtesy the Washington State Department of Natural Resources)
See photos of the 2013 wildfires around Washington state
Firefighters are making contingency plans to protect a major wind farm in case the wildfire burning outside Wenatchee makes a sudden run to the southwest.
Bulldozers and hand crews are being brought in to dig lines around the wind farm, just in case. The fire is burning about eight miles from the farm, but Rick Isaacson at fire command said this fire has made big runs before.
“There’s contingency plans being made and trying to be implemented to put a dozer line in to chop off the south end of that if we can,” he said.
Several airplanes joined the firefight on Tuesday. A DC-9 conversion is now dumping retardant on the fire to try and slow its run to the southwest. Two smaller planes that can reload with water, in-flight, are also in the fight.
“You can imagine a plane just dipping its belly into the river,” Maryellen Fitzgerald at the incident command center said.
This fire has burned nearly 60,000 acres, destroyed several homes, and is less than 10 percent contained.
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